Reflection is a listening technique where the listener echos key aspects of the conversation back to the speaker; it is a confirmation of understanding; a signal that the listener is engaged and paying attention to the speaker. It is a powerful strategy to engage a speaker.

Not surprisingly, a similar technique also applies to online advertising, and is also equally effective in engaging the searcher.

In my experience a ‘reflective ad’ will typically outperform even the most creative text ad.

Building a reflective ad

To build  a reflective AdWords ad we are going to use Google AdWord’s  Keyword Insertion capability to reflect the searchers term back at them.

Keyword insertion is a special ad statement {Keyword}  that substitutes a  searched term into the ad text. This can be added into your ad copy, the display URL or even the destination URL

When the ad is operating, the searcher sees their own search term where ever {keyword} appears in your ad eg assume the searched term was premium widgets

Practical reflective ads

All good so far, but ad text lengths still apply, so if your searcher enters a long term, your ad could be too long, so keyword insertion provides an alternative value should this occur.

So in this example, a long search term would end up looking like this:

Proper case

A final refinement with the Keyword Insert is it ability to change the case of the original search query. This subtle but important presentation refinement is set by the capitalisation used in the keyword command word itself viz:

Note that AdWords Capitalisation rules also apply which dictate there should be no excessive capitalisation

More information on Keyword Insertion is available here: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74996

So, set up a reflect ad in your campaigns, and test my theory that they will outperform your other ads.

Ill be interested to hear your results

Cheers
Pete